Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold

Tony Liang

University of British Columbia

October 3, 2024

What is protein?

  • Building blocks of life.
  • Involved in every important activity that happens inside every living thing.
    • Muscle movement
    • Digestion
    • Oxygen transport
    • And more . . .

What’s special of protein structure?

  • Protein function is closely related to its structure.

  • So, knowing structure helps scientists design new medicines and understand diseases.

However . . .

  • Figuring out a protein’s structure is extremely hard.

  • It’s like solving 3D puzzle with thousands of pieces, yet without knowing what the final picture looks like.

  • Usually done by long time and expensive experiments.

Fig. 1 The various structures formed by amino acids and proteins.1

How Alphafold works

Fig. 2: Basic workflow of Alphafold.

Alphafold can predict the potential structure from an amino acid sequence, super fast with fairly high accuracy.

Alphafold

  • Rise from a competition “Olympics for protein folding”
    • Given an amino acid sequence, can you predict its protein structure?
  • Artificial Intelligence algorthim, fully computational
  • Very well prediction with atomic accuracy.

Fig. 3 AlphaFold produces highly accurate structures. 1

Thanks!

References

Jumper, John, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov, Olaf Ronneberger, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, et al. 2021. “Highly Accurate Protein Structure Prediction with AlphaFold.” Nature 596 (7873): 583–89.